Who hasn't missed an important call or woke up at the wrong time because you forgot to charge your cellphone over night? Well, Nokia hopes to make that a thing of the past by developing a technology that would use ambient radio radiation to perpetually charge a phone's battery.
According to a report by Technology Review, the Nokia Research Center (NRC) has already developed a prototype that converts radio waves into electrical energy. RFID tags and crystal radios work on a similar principle, but the Nokia team hopes to develop a wave catcher 10 times more power than the current technology.
The NRC team aims to develop a power harvester that could store up 50 milliwatts of energy, up from the prototype's five milliwatt capacity. The article mentions that 50 milliwatts opens up a range of electronic devices to a life without a plug, as most MP3 players only use 100 milliwatts to operate.
Of course, the technology faces serious technical challenges relating to the efficiency of the harvester, but one of the NRC researchers says that this technology could be ready in three or four years. That lead should give us all plenty of time to come up with new excuses for not answering our phone, as "it was out of juice" clearly won't cut it anymore.
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